Tori Amos

Tori Amos (born Myra Ellen Amos, 1963, in North Carolina) was a piano-bar prodigy who reinvented the confessional singer-songwriter with “Little Earthquakes” (1992) and “Under the Pink,” pairing Bösendorfer virtuosity with unflinching writing about faith, sexuality, and survival. An eight-time Grammy nominee, she co-founded RAINN, the US anti-sexual-violence hotline, and remains a restless album artist three decades on.

Co-writing the silence

In February 2025, Amos was credited among the 1,000-plus co-writers of “Is This What We Want?”, the silent album organized by Ed Newton-Rex with Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, and Hans Zimmer. Its tracks are recordings of empty studios — the sound of what British music becomes, the organizers argued, if the UK government’s proposal to let AI companies train on copyrighted work without a licence goes through. The track titles spell out “The British Government Must Not Legalise Music Theft To Benefit AI Companies,” and profits went to Help Musicians.

The protest targeted a December 2024 consultation proposing an opt-out copyright exception for text and data mining. Critics — from marquee names to session players — argued opt-out reverses the basic principle that permission precedes use, and that policing every AI crawler is an impossible burden to place on individual artists. Amos, a UK resident for much of her career, lent her name rather than her voice: on this record, that was the point.